Earth coverage antennas are typically used for X-band to Ka-band communications purposes on Earth observing mission spacecraft in low Earth orbits. Such spacecrafts are required to provide ultra-stable platforms for scientific instruments. The antenna is mounted on the side of the spacecraft facing the Earth, pointing towards nadir, but with a wide shaped-beam to cover most or all of the visible part of the Earth. The wide-beam of an Earth coverage antenna maintains an almost isoflux of energy on the Earth. The advantage of an isoflux antenna is that it does not require any moving parts and hence will not cause any vibrations that may affect sensitive scientific instruments on the spacecraft. The Earth coverage antenna has been used for X-band communications in several Earth observation missions including NASA missions such as TERRA, AQUA, LandSat, NPP and JPSS-1. These missions have used two types of Earth Coverage antennas, namely quadrifilar antennas which have peak gain values around 4 dBi and reflectors, which have peak gain values around 8 dBi. Quadrifilar antennas at Ka-band are unfeasible due to manufacturing tolerances. Therefore the reflector antenna option is preferable. Reflector Earth coverage antennas have the advantage of higher gain, but also have the disadvantage of aperture blockage due to strut supports and the feed horn itself. Aperture blockage causes partial “shadows” in certain directions and is mostly unavoidable since the feed horn needs mechanical support to keep it in position relative to the reflector. Although the feed horn aperture blockage cannot be avoided, some conventional antenna systems have eliminated the use of struts by using either a central pole or a radome. One typical radome is described in US Patent Publication No. US20120242539, entitled “Antenna System For Low Earth Orbit Satellites”. However, these alternate designs compromise the antenna performance in different ways. For example, the radome or central pole causes losses and reflections that affect the feed horn performance. Aperture blockage also causes diffraction ripples in the radiation patterns, especially near the shadow regions. The reflector shape necessarily brings its central part close to the feed horn, which is near the feed horn's boresight direction. The level of radiation is the strongest in the feed horn's boresight direction. A significant portion of the radiation is reflected directly back towards the feed horn wherein it is scattered in all directions. A portion of this reflected radiation travels back into the feed horn where it typically is diverted into a resistive load termination. This causes not only energy loss, but the scattering of the radiation off of the feed horn also causes additional interference ripples in the antenna radiation pattern. Since the signal flux on the earth's surface must be kept above a certain level to avoid loss of signal link with ground stations, the presence of interference ripples in the antenna radiation pattern requires that the weaker radiation portions of the antenna pattern be increased to overcome the dips in the pattern. This in turns lowers the peak gain of the antenna, thereby compromising signal strength towards the horizon.